A Wedding Week, Two Cases, and a Girl on the Run with a Hawk

Sheriff Joanna Brady is one week out from her wedding to Butch Dixon. Her mother Eleanor is micro-managing the ceremony down to the napkin folds. Her former mother-in-law and her future mother-in-law are circling. Jenny is twelve going on twenty. Butch's parents are about to arrive. And then two cases land on Joanna's desk in the same window of days. Clayton Rhodes - her octogenarian neighbor, friend, and ranch hand - is found dead in his garage with the engine running, looking for all the world like a heart attack at the wheel. And a woman freshly out of prison, paroled after eight years for murdering her husband, turns up dead. Her fifteen-year-old daughter, the prime suspect, has vanished into the Arizona desert with a red-tailed hawk for company.

Devil's Claw is the eighth Joanna Brady novel, and by this point Jance has the series' moving parts well calibrated: a Cochise County crime that widens unexpectedly, a sheriff stretched between the case and her own life, a sprawl of family members whose claims on her time refuse to wait for the body to be processed. Here she pushes the dual-case structure harder than she has before, with two unrelated investigations running in parallel and a wedding subplot that genuinely will not wait. The book wobbles in places, but the central girl-on-the-run thread is one of the most compelling things Jance has put on the page in this series.

Clayton Rhodes and the 322-Acre Inheritance

Clayton's death looks at first like the kind of quiet ending an old man with a heart condition could plausibly have - alone in his garage, engine on, no signs of struggle. The complication arrives with his estranged daughter Reba, who comes back from California to settle the estate and discovers that her father has bequeathed his 322-acre ranch not to her but to Joanna. Reba is venomous about it. She accuses the sheriff outright of having killed her father to engineer the inheritance, and she is loud enough about the accusation that Joanna can't simply ignore it - she has to work the case knowing that the dead man's daughter is publicly calling her a murderer.

The Clayton plotline is, in some ways, the emotional ballast of the book. Clayton wasn't a victim Joanna was investigating from a distance; he was a friend, a neighbor, the kind of older man who quietly anchors a rural community. Jance writes the loss with the right register - not melodrama, not procedural detachment, but the specific grief of losing someone whose presence you took for granted. Reba's hostility doesn't soften that loss; it adds the indignity of having to defend yourself against the suspicion of a man whose ranch you didn't ask to be given.

Lucy Ridder and the Diskette Her Father Hid

The other case is where the book really lifts. Lucy Ridder is fifteen, half-Apache, a loner so practiced at silence that, in Jance's striking phrase, "the girl's stubborn silence had rendered her so invisible that the other kids no longer even noticed her." Lucy's mother has just been released from prison, where she served eight years for killing Lucy's father - a father Lucy loved. Lucy dreaded the reunion. She knew her mother wasn't coming home for her; her mother was coming home for a mysterious diskette that Lucy's dad had entrusted to her shortly before he died, the contents of which someone would clearly kill for. When the mother turns up dead within days of release, Lucy goes on the lam with her only real companion, a red-tailed hawk named Big Red, threading through the desert toward the foothills of the Dragoon Mountains, where her grandmother and great-grandmother Christina Bagwell live off Middlemarch Road.

Lucy is the best thing in the book. Jance gives her a fully-rendered interiority - the wariness of a child who has been let down by every adult who was supposed to protect her, the pragmatic tenderness she shows the hawk, the calculations of a teenager trying to outthink the people hunting her. The plot mechanics around the diskette aren't going to win awards for ingenuity, and a reader now will notice that the entire macguffin pivots on a piece of obsolete technology that already felt creaky to some readers when the book came out in 2000. But the human core - a girl carrying the last secret her father gave her and refusing to surrender it - holds up.

A Wedding That Will Not Wait

The personal layer is where opinion on this entry tends to split. Joanna is a week from marrying Butch Dixon. Her mother Eleanor has appointed herself the wedding's executive producer; her former mother-in-law and her future mother-in-law are both occupying real estate in the run-up; Jenny is twelve and behaving in ways that suggest she is rehearsing for sixteen. Jance leans into the chaos and gets some good comic and emotional moments out of it - the multi-mother negotiations are exactly the kind of small-town family texture the series does well, and Butch's steadiness through it is one of the reasons readers root for him even when reviewers in earlier books have called him a touch too perfect.

The fair criticism, and one I think lands, is that the wedding takes up enough oxygen that the cases have to compete for it. Several reviewers have flagged that the criminal resolution at the end happens too quickly and partly off-page, as if Jance ran out of room for it once the wedding logistics had eaten the rest. That's a real structural cost. If you came for a tight procedural, you are going to feel the seams; if you came for a series novel where the sheriff's life is the point and the case is the spine, you'll feel rewarded.

What This Entry Is, and Isn't

The strengths of Devil's Claw are not in plotting cleverness. They are in characterization (Lucy, Clayton, Reba's righteous fury), in atmosphere (the Dragoon Mountains, a desert ranch in the days before a wedding, a hawk threading through scrub), and in the accumulated emotional capital of eight books worth of Joanna Brady's life. Reviewers have praised the cleanness of Jance's prose - she does not lean on graphic violence or profanity to manufacture stakes - and her gift for letting Cochise County feel like a real place where real people live and die.

The weaknesses are, by this point, the same weaknesses Kirkus and Publishers Weekly have been naming for several books: prose that doesn't dazzle, secondary characters - particularly older women - who can feel flatter than they should, and a tendency to let personal subplot crowd procedural rigor. Some of the technology has aged. The villain's late-stage exit feels rushed. None of that is fatal; it's just the texture of a working series novel by a writer who is more interested in her characters' emotional lives than in pyrotechnic plotting. If you've followed Joanna this far, this is one of the entries that pays off the investment.

Rating: 4.0/5 ⭐

Perfect for: Readers continuing the Joanna Brady series, fans of southwestern mysteries with strong female protagonists, anyone who enjoys procedurals where a teenager-on-the-run subplot does as much emotional work as the murder case.

Skip if: You came for tight procedural plotting and don't want the wedding logistics to share the page, you find late-1990s/early-2000s technology references distracting, or you'd rather start the series at book one.